Etienne Ezo knows exactly when he contracted Ebola and one of the most terrifying and painful ordeals a person can go through began.

The 49-year-old nurse was working at one of the largest hospitals in Bunia, the capital of the Congo’s Ituri region and the epicentre of a major outbreak that has been raging for months.

With only plastic gloves and an apron to prevent contamination, he was infected when treating a group of critically ill people who had arrived from Mongbwalu, a nearby gold mining town.

“It was the day after these people arrived,” recalled Etienne, a father of three. “When I got to work, I was doing some blood tests, and then felt like I had vertigo. I had to lie down because I felt so unsteady.”

“Shortly after that I started vomiting. That carried on a long time. It was like I was vomiting everything out of my body. The next thing to happen was this sensation of itchiness. I was scratching my body from my head to my toes,” he told The Telegraph.

It was early May, and dozens of people in this part of the Congo were sick and dying unexplainably.

That is because the outbreak, which has now killed at least 63 people and infected 393 more, is from the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, a distinct species of the virus that standard tests are unable to pick up.

Bundibugyo also has no approved vaccines or treatments.

“At the start we were extremely scared and stressed because we had no idea what was happening,” he said.

“I told the medical team that I really wasn’t feeling well. They put me on an IV drip because I was becoming so weak and dehydrated, and they gave me antihistamine pills to help with the itching and painkillers.

“While all of this was happening, I then started to have very severe diarrhoea. It went on like this for many days. I was delirious so I cannot recall exactly how long. I had a very high fever and was just completely exhausted all the time. It was fatigue like I have never felt before.”

Etienne was one of eight members of the medical team put in an isolation ward, before they knew for sure what they were sick with.

Blood samples had to be sent to a lab in the DRC capital, Kinshasa – 2,000 miles away – to be tested. It was only with the third of his ten blood tests that it was confirmed he had the virus.

It was around that time, on May 15, that the Congolese Ministry of Health officially declared an Ebola outbreak in Ituri.

A day later, the World Health Organization (WHO) determined that the situation constituted a public health emergency of international concern, given how long Ebola had been spreading undetected.

Sources have previously told The Telegraph that the first case has now been tracked as far back as January.

“Until we had raised the alert and had confirmation from Kinshasa that this was a new type of Ebola, we could not explain why all of these people were coming in with the same symptoms,” said Etienne.

‘Ebola seems to pick out the weakest people’

Though he remained in excruciating discomfort through his period in isolation, his symptoms did not deteriorate further.

“Some people around me were getting much worse, but I did not have the worst aspects of Ebola like haemorrhaging with blood coming through the edge of the eyes.

“I started to improve after around a week. Ebola seems to pick out the weakest people.”

Etienne believes he survived, alongside three of his colleagues, because he was given a vaccine for a different strain of Ebola, the more common Zaire species, in 2017 during another outbreak.

“The people who have not had the vaccine are all dying,” he said.

There is not yet formal evidence to prove the Zaire vaccine protects against Bundibugyo, but the death rate for the virus varies drastically based on how quickly a patient is isolated and given supportive treatment.

In Uganda, which has recorded 16 cases so far and has a relatively developed healthcare system, the case fatality rate stands at just 6 per cent.

But in Ituri, where there is deep mistrust of healthcare workers and many people are refusing treatment, that figure is more than double, standing at 13.6 per cent.

Worse still, in North Kivu, a Congolese province to the south where 19 people have been infected, the death rate is 68 per cent.

Experts say the figure has been driven largely by people escaping isolation and returning to their homes.

‘My children were all terrified’

While Etienne’s colleagues scrambled to deal with the escalating emergency around him, the nurse remained in his isolation bed, which was in fact barely separate from the other patients.

He was given antibiotics, painkillers and vitamins to assist his recovery.

“One of the worst things about it was not being able to hug my wife and my children for two weeks. They could see me, but they could not come within ten metres of me. My children were all terrified.”

Meanwhile, a close colleague of Etienne’s who was the first to treat the arrivals from Mongbwalu, with little by way of personal protection, died from the disease.

“We did not have any personal protective clothing for a month. It took a long time,” he said.

Aid groups have warned that critical shortages of basic PPE like masks, gloves, and gowns are contributing significantly to the spread of the virus.

At least 100 armed factions have been warring for power and resources in the region for more than three decades, and organising mass transportation of materials through dangerous land has been extremely difficult, according to the agencies on the ground.

The WHO said on Friday that 200 metric tons of PPE had now arrived in the Congo, although much more was needed to meet demand.

Many people believe Ebola is a ‘fake illness’

Etienne, who recovered and is now back at work, said the outbreak shows no sign of slowing.

“We are still getting people coming in who are bleeding, and there is little we can do about that. We can only heal the ones who arrive early, before the worst symptoms,” he said.

Confirmed case numbers have jumped by 45 per cent since May 29, standing at 394 as of June 5.

Dr Jean Kaseya, director of the Africa Centre for Disease Control, told journalists on Friday that despite pledges of more than $500 million from countries around the world to help control the outbreak, the agency had actually received very little money so far.

“Not even $3 million has reached us,” Dr Kaseya said.

“The worst thing is that there are still many people here who do not believe in Ebola,” Etienne told The Telegraph.

“They think it’s a fake illness, that it’s been invented by the authorities to kill them off.

“Because they know I work at the hospital, they think I am part of it so they threaten me. Every day I get threatened in the street on my way to work and I get angry messages sent to me on my phone.”

“Misinformation is almost as dangerous as the virus itself, and spreads just as fast,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said in a statement on Friday.

The global health chief has recently returned from Ituri, where he met with Etienne and his recovered colleagues as they were discharged.

Etienne will now join a WHO-run “survivors programme”, that will monitor those fortunate enough to recover from Bundibugyo, over the next 18 months.

The cohort will be subject to regular testing to ensure no virus remains in their bodies.

Ebola can linger for months or even years in certain parts of the body – particularly in the eyes, central nervous system, and testes – resulting in relapses or sexual transmission long after a patient has initially recovered.

Back in Bunia, the 49-year-old nurse said he douses himself in chlorine solution in an outdoor shower every night after leaving his shift at the hospital, just in case.

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